Vaclav Klaus warns against the EU's Soviet tendencies

The Brussels system, says Václav Klaus, is starting to resemble the old Soviet bloc. The Czech President is alarmed by the EU's disdain for democracy, by its arbitrary application of its own rules, by its refusal to countenance criticism.

One has to be careful in drawing such parallels. Plainly the EU is not the USSR. Its member states are all parliamentary democracies. It doesn't run show trials or operate gulags or ban its people from travelling.

But that isn't Klaus's point. His comparison, if I understand him correctly, isn't with Stalin's Russia, but with Husák's Czechoslovakia. By the 1970s, the Communist regimes had lost their ideological motive and, with it, some of their brutality. They had become ramshackle, corrupt, petty. The people who ran them no longer believed – if ever they had believed – in Marxism-Leninism. But they understood that their place in society depended on maintaining the system.

Dissidents were still harassed, but were rarely imprisoned or tortured. Indeed, they were rarely put on trial. That was the scary thing. If you criticised the authorities, things would mysteriously start becoming awkward for you. Your driving licence would not be renewed. You would be unable to find any but menial jobs. Your children would be expelled from university.

Such is the behaviour of rulers who no longer believe in their own legitimacy. Until 1968, when Soviet tanks rolled into Prague, there were still idealistic party members who saw the denial of democracy as contingent. Once people could see that socialism was more efficient than capitalism, they hoped, it would be possible to move to a phased restoration of parliamentary rule.

In the Evropeisky Soyuz, too, there was until very recently a variant of this idea (which Friedrich Engels called "false consciousness"). The voters, Euro-federalists used to argue, had been led astray by rabble-rousing populists and press barons. Put the facts fairly in front of the people, they thought, and the people would come to accept deeper integration.

The French and Dutch "No" votes of 2005 put paid to that illusion, just as the Prague Spring put paid to the idea of democratic Communism. Nowadays, Eurocrats demand consent rather than conviction, acquiescence rather than allegiance.

Awareness of their unpopularity makes frightened and tetchy which in turn makes them lash out at opponents. Last month, Klaus came to the European Parliament and made a moderately Euro-sceptic speech. The EU had been a great success, he said, but it was in danger of drifting away from its peoples. All polities worked better when there was an opposition, he added. We should all listen to dissenting voices. The response of MEPs? To shout abuse and then storm out. Deliciously, they staged their walk-out just as Mr Klaus reached his point about listening to different points of view, thereby neatly vindicating his critique.

What happened next vindicated him even more, for not one of the protesting MEPs was so much as ticked off. Last year, by contrast, when a group of MEPs had held up banners in the chamber with the word "referendum", the parliamentary authorities went ballistic: ushers were sent in to take away our placards, the party leaders made pompous speeches comparing us to the Nazis and 14 of us were later fined.

This double-standard is part of daily life in Brussels. Euro-integrationists can get away with a great deal, even outright abuse of their expenses, without censure. Yet when an Austrian Euro-sceptic made himself unpopular by photographing MEPs signing in when they had no meetings to attend, he was fined thousands of euros for, in effect, filling in a form incorrectly. It eerily recalls the Tom Stoppard world of Czechoslovakian dissent where the authorities, rather than confronting opponents directly, made their lives disagreeable in other ways.

You might complain that it's hardly my place to say these things: I never lived with the quotidian repression of late Soviet Communism. But Václav Klaus did. The day he was inaugurated as president, he told his countrymen: "I was just like you: neither a collaborator nor a dissident. I am your bad conscience". When he warns us against going back to those times, we should listen.